


No Mistake

by TheSigyn



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-21
Updated: 2010-02-21
Packaged: 2018-04-15 10:19:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4603074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Interspecies relationships are problematic to begin with. When the relationship spans several centuries and four regenerations, things can get intense. After he says goodbye to Wilf at the end of Journey’s End, there is only one person in the universe who can help the Doctor face everything. And that person has to be Sarah Jane Smith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In my mind, the Doctor has not had intimate relations with many of his companions. Many are students, surrogate family members, or just friends. But there are some where you become pretty sure something was going on off screen. Romana, for one – she was a Time Lord as well, and with him for an awfully long time. (And Tom Baker did in fact marry Lalla Ward.) And another I became fairly sure about was Sarah Jane Smith. Based on the interactions between Sarah Jane and the third Doctor in The Spider Planet, the fourth in The Arc in Space and the Brain of Morbius, and the fifth in The Five Doctors, not to mention the stunned and delighted reunion with the tenth in School Reunion, I formed this little story in the hopes of making sense out of all of it. Not to mention, he just looked so pathetic at the end of Journey’s End! Someone had to fix it.

The remnants of the End of the World drunks were still singing at the street corners. The celebrations had been going on all night, ever since the return of the planet to the heavens. The moon had never looked so beautiful.   
  
For those few on the planet who could see it. Right now, in Ealing, the rain was souping down, and it sounded like a small army was practicing drills above Sarah Jane’s attic workshop. “Are we done?” Luke asked.   
  
Sarah Jane drew in a deep breath. “Yes!” she hissed in relief. “Mr. Smith, execute the access program.”   
  
“Executing,” Mr. Smith said, with his smooth, mechanical voice. “Phone and wireless exchange reconnected for Great Britain.”   
  
Sarah Jane, Luke, K-9 and Mr. Smith had spent the last six hours quietly organizing the refit of all the wireless systems for the planet earth, which had been severely tangled by the joyride the daleks had just taken the planet on, and the subsequent journey home towed by the TARDIS.  
  
“Excuse me, Mistress,” K-9 said quietly. “But the anomaly is approaching critical. Suggest you return me to my primary mission.”   
  
Sarah Jane nodded, and smiled — a little too brightly. “Right oh, K-9. Good dog.”   
  
“Indeed, Mistress,” K-9 said. Luke opened the safe, and K-9 returned to his mission keeping the planet from being swallowed by the black hole. Sarah Jane closed the door on him.  
  
Luke was not particularly socially apt, or he didn’t think of himself as such in comparison to the rest of his mental facilities. But when it came to Sarah Jane, he had learned to read her signals ninety-eight percent accurately. “You’ll see him again, Mum,” Luke said. Sarah Jane looked up at him, her eyes bright. “The next fly-by is in just six weeks.”   
  
“Oh,” she said. Sarah smiled and squeezed Luke’s shoulder. “You’re right. Let’s head downstairs. We missed tea, but what about I make us some supper.”   
  
“Great,” Luke said. They retreated down the stairs and Sarah Jane busied herself in the kitchen. Luke helped, but with all the great strengths they both had, neither one of them were brilliant cooks. Sarah was absentminded. When she dropped a plate on the floor, she clenched her hands. Her face tightened in frustration. It bothered Luke. He pushed her toward a chair. “You’ve had a hard day, Mum,” he said. “Let me do that.” He stooped down and picked up the broken pieces.   
  
Sarah was holding her temples as she rested her head in her hand. Luke decided to stop beating around the bush. He had done everything he could. He’d suggested they do some work, in the hopes of brushing the cobwebs of darkness out of his mother’s face. He had even calculated a sub-cyclic impulse which had maintained the anomaly, so that Sarah could have a few more precious hours to spend with her daft metal dog. Supper wasn’t succeeding. Luke was out of distractions. After the initial over-joyed greeting as Sarah had gotten home, the darkness had been creeping stronger and stronger across her face.   
  
Luke dumped the broken crockery in the garbage and joined Sarah at the table. “You left him too quickly,” he said simply.   
  
Sarah looked up at him. “Who?” she asked, but she already knew.   
  
“The Doctor,” Luke said.   
  
Sarah shook her head. “I couldn’t stay.”   
  
“Why not?”   
  
“It’s hard to explain,” Sarah said, and she stared at the clock on the wall without seeing the time. “He’s not human, Luke. He’s moved on.” She looked very wistful as she said, “He’s not even my Doctor anymore. My Doctor died,” Sarah Jane said. “A long time ago. He belongs to Rose, now. And Donna and Martha. I’m just... in the way.” She looked over at her son. “I wasted years of my life waiting for him,” she said. “I didn’t admit it, even to myself, but that’s what I did. Everything I did was just... marking time. And when he finally came back, it wasn’t for me. I don’t regret a single minute of it, but...” She looked down at the table. “I couldn’t stay another second. Most of them are hardly older than you. I was starting to feel like a grandmother.”   
  
“I’ll bet you half the people in that ship were older than you,” Luke said. “Mr. Smith gave me some statistics on Captain Harkness that you wouldn’t believe.”   
  
Sarah Jane’s head shot up and she glared ice at him. “Don’t you go looking up Torchwood,” she snapped. “They’re dangerous.”   
  
“I won’t, Mum,” he smiled. “You say you couldn’t stay, but now you’re missing him.”   
  
Sarah shook her head. “I always miss him.” She took a deep breath. “I had to go home.”   
  
“But you might never see him again,” Luke said.   
  
Sarah sighed. “True,” she said. But in the silence that followed her words, a sound slowly built across the hall in the sitting room.   
  
Luke turned his head to the sound, frightened. But his mother smiled, partly in disbelief, partly in trepidation. There was only one thing in the universe that made that sound. Sarah stood slowly and took Luke’s hand. “Though unlikely. Stay behind me.”   
  
Luke followed Sarah across the hall and gasped at the large blue Police Box that was slowly materializing in the middle of their carpet. “But that’s...”   
  
“The TARDIS,” Sarah said with a small smile. “Luke. I think you’re about to meet the Doctor.”   
  
Fifteen minutes later, the two of them were still waiting for the door to open. The TARDIS stood, seemingly dead, in the middle of their sitting room, utterly and completely still. “Why isn’t he coming out?” Luke finally asked.   
  
“I don’t know,” Sarah Jane said. She was nervous. “There’s no saying he’s still on the same time line,” she reminded him. “It could be a hundred years in the future for him, or sometime last week. It might not even be the same Doctor, though he tends not to bounce around outside general regenerations. The events we just experienced may have nothing to do with the events he’s undergone.”   
  
“So you’re saying something could be wrong?”   
  
Sarah Jane nodded. “Stay there,” she said, and quietly tried the door. It was locked. She considered knocking. She even raised her hand to do it. But it felt wrong. “Luke!” she said, brusque with efficiency. “Wait here. Be polite if anyone or anything comes out that door. I’ll be right back.” She fled up the stairs. Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds later she came back down with a tiny key in her hand. The TARDIS key had been locked deep in a strong box in her attic. “I’m going in,” she said. “If you hear me screaming, run upstairs to Mr. Smith. Do not follow me inside, no matter what happens.” She had few hopes of him following that instruction, but at least she could make it.   
  
“I thought the Doctor was a good man,” Luke said.   
  
“He’s the best man in the universe,” Sarah Jane said. “But he’s not invulnerable. He has enemies, and we don’t know what’s in there. Or what will happen once I go inside.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You remember what to do if I don’t come back?”   
  
It was something she said sometimes. Shortly after Maria’s father had gathered the details of what Sarah Jane did, she had asked him to take custody of Luke if anything should happen to her. “Of course I do,” Luke said.   
  
“Right.” Sarah Jane entered the key in the lock and turned it.   
  
The door opened on a darkness that swallowed Luke’s mother entire and left him standing alone beside a mysterious blue box. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sarah crept in on cat feet. The TARDIS was dark. That made Sarah Jane nervous. She did not like this redecorating job the TARDIS had pulled — it was dark and industrial at the best of times. She was used to gleaming white porcelain and shining lights, but the Doctor had stripped the interior of the ship during the Time War to make it easier to get at the lower reaches of the engines, and he’d never gotten around to putting the, as it were, dry wall and flooring back.   
  
But now the TARDIS was even darker. The industrial lights were dim, and the TARDIS looked dead. It was like walking into a goth club. She glanced at a few controls. There were only a few she understood, but the TARDIS was in standby. It was awaiting orders.   
  
Sarah Jane touched a button she thought she recognized — the locator. It was hard to locate anyone in the TARDIS — she herself had gotten lost in it a dozen times, once for three whole days before the Doctor found her — so the Doctor had installed an internal locator. It didn’t always work, and almost never worked for the interior bowels of the ship which were constantly in dimensional flux, but it could usually be used to locate a basic humanoid life form in the section that contained the control room and living quarters.   
  
The locator spun, coughed, called Sarah Jane a rude name in Urdu, and told her to look around — the Doctor should be in the control room with her. It seemed to have gotten eccentric. But she could see that there was no one else on the scanner. No one in the living quarters. Sarah pulled away from the control and moved around the console.   
  
And nearly tripped over the Doctor, who had sunk, head in his hands, onto the floor. “Doctor?”   
  
The Doctor looked up, alarmed. “Sarah Jane!” He looked wretched. Wet and miserable and exhausted, as if he had just come in from the rain outside. “What’s wrong? How did you get here?”   
  
Sarah Jane looked down at him. “You happen to be parked in my sitting room,” she said.   
  
“What?” He turned, half rose, and glanced at a few of the controls. “Oh, lord, it was a mistake. I hit the translocator with my jacket.” He sank back down onto the ground. “It must have zoned in on the TARDIS codes that K-9 transferred.”   
  
“So... you’re still on my time line?” Sarah Jane said. “We just got back from the Medusa Cascade.”   
  
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “Same time line. More or less.” He thought he had lost a few hours jumping the dimensions.   
  
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.   
  
The Doctor shook his head, and — very unconvincingly, considering he was slouched on the floor in a perfect attitude of despair,— said, “Nothing.”   
  
Sarah had been the first one to leave the TARDIS, eager to get back to Luke, and eager to get herself out of the way. “Where’s Martha, Jack and them? They go back to Torchwood, UNIT?”   
  
The Doctor nodded.   
  
“Where’s Rose?”   
  
“I sent her back to her family,” the Doctor said.   
  
“And... Himself?”   
  
“I sent him with her,” the Doctor said quietly. “It seemed fair. I get the TARDIS. He gets Rose.”   
  
Sarah Jane was beginning to get a handle on what was wrong. She began to suspect that running like a frightened ravvit the first chance she got had been a major mistake. Fortunately, the TARDIS seemed to know this, and had done what it could to rectify it. The Doctor might say that he’d accidently hit the translocator, or whatever it was, but Sarah Jane knew this TARDIS. It had a way of dancing off with her inside it, and dropping the Doctor where he needed to be. She had a feeling that the TARDIS knew that where the Doctor needed to be was right here, right now, with Sarah Jane Smith.   
  
She asked the final question, which would clinch her suspicion. She was afraid to say it, because she was afraid she knew the answer. That insane dalek had kept muttering on about how the most faithful companion would die. And who was that? The one who actually shared the Doctor’s mind. She knelt on the ground beside him and watched his eyes. “And Donna?” she asked.   
  
The Doctor broke. For a man who could stand in a sea of death with a grim smile on his face, his tears were like acid. They just looked wrong. He sobbed, exactly twice, and Sarah Jane forgot that he wasn’t her Doctor anymore. She forgot that she was supposed to have let him go. She forgot that he belonged to others now. She caught his shoulders and gathered him to her, and he hugged her tightly to him and shuddered in grief.   
  
“Shh,” she said, as she would have said to Luke when he’d had one of his Wormwood night terrors and woke up screaming. “Shh. I’m so sorry.”   
  
He shook his head and pulled away. “She’s fine,” he said, banishing his tears as if they were the silliest thing ever. “She’s fine, she’s with her family.”   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “Wherever she is, she’s not fine,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be like this.”   
  
The Doctor’s face twisted again, but only briefly. “She’s fine,” he said. He swallowed. “I had to... I had to take it away.”   
  
“Take what?” Sarah asked. “The metacrisis?”   
  
“No. All of it,” the Doctor said. “All of it. From the moment she met me.”   
  
A lightning bolt of horror passed through Sarah Jane at those words. “You mean... everything? Everything she saw, everything she experienced with you, s-she had to lose that?” The Doctor only nodded in sadness. “Why?”   
  
“It was that or let her die,” the Doctor said.   
  
It was such a horrific prospect. Sarah Jane’s entire life had hinged on her time with the Doctor. If she hadn’t met him, she didn’t know what would have become of her. Or of the planet. Or of worlds unknown. To touch the Doctor was to become part of the flame, and to have that flame extinguished, forever...! Sarah Jane would rather have died. But she didn’t say that to the Doctor. “You could do that?” she said instead. “Take it all away? All the memories, everything she did?”   
  
“She still did everything,” the Doctor said. “And it’s possible there’ll still be some residual memory in her subconscious. But if she really remembers, her entire neural net will collapse.” He looked over at Sarah Jane. “It could have been worse,” he said. “I had some friends called Zoe and Jamie, once. Did you meet Zoe? No, that was a good generation too early for you. The Time Lords took their memories. Just... for knowing who I was.”  
  
“Is that why you left me behind?” Sarah Jane said. “Because if I went with you, the Time Lords would have done the same to me?”   
  
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “I thought you might not like that.” He stared into nothing.  
  
“You’re on your own again,” Sarah Jane said. She knew full well that the Doctor was not good on his own. He had tried, — her Doctor had tried — so long ago, to leave her behind, worried about her. But she worried too much about him to let him go. Until that awful day in, as it turned out, Aberdeen, when the sky closed completely and finally over her head.   
  
The Doctor’s face crumpled again, and Sarah Jane reached for him. He pulled her against him, into his lap, and held her fiercely. His breath was hot and strong against her throat, and she closed her eyes, knowing this was just... it just wasn’t. It couldn’t be. It could never be again.   
  
But then the Doctor’s lips were on her jaw, and then they had traveled up her cheek, and then danced hesitantly over her open lips before they settled firmly and sensuously over her mouth. It was still his kiss, his mouth tasting of honeysuckle and o-zone, not the taste of a human at all. The shape of his teeth was so different, but his lips caressed hers the same way they always had. This... oh, Doctor... this was not fair.   
  
About the time she thought this his kiss slowed, and he pulled away. They blinked at each other over a few scant centimeters. His face was different, younger, more angular, less maniacal. Hers was different, too, softer, rounder, more compassionate, no longer fresh and new. And they saw each other with the same eyes.   
  
“Sorry about that,” the Doctor murmured. “You feel awfully familiar, sitting with me like this,” he told her. “I wasn’t thinking.”   
  
A quiet knock interrupted whatever Sarah Jane was going to say at that point, and she was actually glad, because she had no idea what it might be. The two of them jumped apart like they’d been shocked. “That’s Luke,” she said. “He must be getting worried.”   
  
“I should go,” the Doctor said, standing up. “I didn’t mean to come here.”  
  
Sarah Jane stood with him. “Well, now you’re here you should sit and have some supper.”   
  
“No,” the Doctor said. “You know me.”   
  
“I know, you don’t do families.” The look on Sarah Jane’s face was mischievous in the extreme. “Luke isn’t families.”   
  
The knock sounded again and the door swung mere millimeters open. “Mum?” Luke’s voice whispered through the humming TARDIS.   
  
“Luke!” Sarah Jane called out. “What’s the square root of pi?”   
  
Luke opened the door wide and stared into the TARDIS. He did not look particularly surprised to see it bigger on the inside — Sarah Jane’s version of fireside stories were TARDIS stories. “What, all of it?”   
  
“Just go until someone stops you.”   
  
Luke sighed and started reciting from the doorway, “One point seven seven two four five three eight five oh nine zero five five one six zero two—” Luke was sounding bored by now, but the Doctor was staring at the open door in bemusement. “— seven two nine eight one six seven four eight three three one four—”  
  
The bait took. The Doctor darted to the door and grabbed Luke by the shoulders. “He’s human,” he called back at Sarah Jane in bewilderment.   
  
Sarah Jane leaned on the console of the TARDIS and smirked. “Yes.”   
  
The Doctor turned Luke around. “But he’s six months old!”   
  
“Mum!” Luke sounded embarrassed. “Did you tell him?”   
  
“I told him you were fourteen,” Sarah Jane said.   
  
“She didn’t need to tell me,” the Doctor said, “I’m clever.”  
  
“And time sensitive,” Luke accused him with cunning realization.   
  
“Indeedy. How do you accommodate for the accelerated hormonal balance?”   
  
“It’s mostly an adrenaline overcompensation, but living with Mum you hardly notice. My friend Clyde takes me skateboarding if I get wonky. I’m terrible. Sudden fear of death helps every time.”   
  
“What?” Sarah Jane asked. “Is there something wrong with him?”   
  
“Doesn’t matter, Mum, I handle it,” Luke said, looking embarrassed.   
  
“But there’s more to it than that,” the Doctor said, pointing his sonic screwdriver at Luke’s head. “There’s a nine point seven six acceleration in antigen production, and — WOW!” He dropped the screwdriver and stepped back, shaking his wrist as if Luke had sparked him with static electricity. “That’s a telekinetic potential that’s off the scale!”   
  
“I know,” Luke said, half boasting, half ashamed. “I nearly crashed the moon into the earth once.”   
  
“You’re not human,” the Doctor said, turning the screwdriver back on.   
  
“To him that’s a compliment,” Sarah Jane called over to her son.   
  
The Doctor ignored her. He dragged Luke over to the console and poked a few buttons. “You are, but you aren’t. You can’t be, there’s no way humanity could be this advanced.”   
  
“Is that the original?” Luke said.   
  
“What?”   
  
Luke took the screwdriver out of the Doctor’s hand and turned it around. “It’s got more settings than Mum’s,” he said, and handed it back.   
  
“Of course it does,” the Doctor said. “It’s mine. All right, how did you make him?”   
  
“I didn’t,” Sarah Jane said, indignant. “I rescued him.”   
  
“But you had to be involved, he’s got your brainwaves,” the Doctor said. “Or a replica, buried in there with the rest of it.”   
  
“What?” both Luke and Sarah said together.   
  
“Right there,” the Doctor said, pointing to a readout on the console. There were two charts. One with an ordinary brainwave pattern and another that looked like pure static.   
  
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Sarah said. “I don’t follow a line.”   
  
“Mum, he’s right!” Luke cried. He pointed at a spot in the static that looked exactly like all the others. “Right on the top, Mum! That one’s you!”   
  
“Here,” the Doctor said, tapping a few buttons, and the static dissipated until there were only a few lines on the screen, then only three or four, and finally just the one, next to Sarah Jane’s. They were a spot on match. “You, him,” the Doctor said. “Or part of him. How did you make him?”   
  
“Luke was made by the Bane,” Sarah Jane said. “To absorb human brainwave patterns. But I didn’t know they caught me.”   
  
“Did you go under an arch?” Luke asked. “Maria said there was an arch. Hey, Mum! I guess this means I’m part Maria, too.” He looked positively thrilled. Luke didn’t admit it, but Sarah Jane knew he was hurt by the idea that he had no family. That Sarah Jane and Maria had gone into his mental construction made him feel like he belonged. “You really are my Mum,” he said. “Top of the pile.”   
  
Sarah Jane grinned at him. She loved Luke more than she’d ever loved anyone, ever. Including the Doctor.   
  
“Who’s Maria?” the Doctor asked.   
  
“Me,” Sarah Jane said with a laugh. “She’s just like me when you met me. Only precocious. She’s just fourteen. She lives across the way.”   
  
“She helps us chase aliens,” Luke said.   
  
“You’re chasing aliens?” the Doctor asked.   
  
“Yes. Doctor, I think it’s time you meet Mr. Smith.”   
  
The Doctor let himself be led into Sarah Jane’s house, brought up to the attic, and shown the details of their set up. The Doctor, much to his surprise, was impressed. Both by Sarah Jane’s attic, and in particular by Luke. It was a little unfair to Sarah Jane, in that Luke usurped the Doctor, and the Doctor usurped Luke. In no time they were talking in shorthand, making jokes about high physics, discussing the precepts of intertemporal navigation. Sarah Jane left them playing table tennis and using the game to calculate astro-gravity lag. Whatever that was.   
  
Sarah went back to the kitchen, and made supper. Luke still needed to eat, after all. She was a mother. She couldn’t shirk her duties. Even if it did mean she was stuck in the kitchen while a human amalgamation of the Bane and the last Time Lord in the universe played table tennis in her spare room.   
  
There was a time, Sarah recalled, when the Doctor was more apt to send her for a cup of tea than a refreshing chat. But that was when she first met him. She thought she had risen in his estimation by now. She supposed she hadn’t.   
  
After about twenty-five minutes Sarah called them downstairs. They came down arguing good-naturedly, and Sarah felt for all the world as if she was calling Luke and Clyde. Except that Clyde kept Luke’s conversation to a level that an ordinary human being could understand, while when Luke and the Doctor came into the kitchen they were discussing the time dilation effect on the gravity mass of neutron stars in accordance with the theory of sub-space flux.   
  
By now it was nearly midnight. After discussing the relative merits of cider vs. balsamic vinegar in the melting of Slytheen, Sarah finally put her foot down. “All right, Luke. It’s time for bed.”   
  
“But Mum!”   
  
Sarah didn’t argue with him. She just got that look. “School’s starting regular tomorrow, it was on the news,” she said.   
  
Luke sighed. “All right.” He stood up from the table and kissed Sarah on the cheek. “Goodnight, Mum.”   
  
“‘Night, Luke.”   
  
Luke went to the door, then suddenly stopped. He turned back. “Doctor?” he said, looking awkward for the first time in talking to him. “I realize I might not ever see you again. And I just wanted to say.... If you hadn’t taken Mum out into space, and taught her all those things... I would have been dismantled by the Bane once I’d served my purpose, and they got their brainwave readings. Mum would never have found me. Never have rescued me. Which means I wouldn’t be alive. And, I wouldn’t have a home. And though Mum’s my mum, and I’ve never met you before... I’ve always kind of thought of you as my dad. It’s... been really great meeting you.” He stuck out his hand.   
  
The Doctor looked awkward for approximately one second, then he clasped Luke’s hand in his and drew him into a brusk, one armed hug. “It would be an honor,” he said with a smile. He shook Luke by the shoulder as he said, “I’d be proud.”   
  
Luke was blushing. “Right. Goodnight, then,” he said, and he went up to his room.   
  
The Doctor looked a little shaken.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Sarah Jane said. “I had no idea he felt that way.”   
  
“Actually, he’s not that far off from a Time Lord,” the Doctor said quietly. “Mentally speaking.”   
  
“I could tell,” Sarah Jane said, and she knew she sounded petulant. She’d felt left out for most of this evening. She’d been feeling left out all day.   
  
“He loves you, you know,” the Doctor said.   
  
“I know,” Sarah Jane said, collecting the dishes.   
  
“I don’t think you do. You’re more than a mother to him. You’re like a savior.”   
  
“Well, he could pick up his room for the savior more often,” Sarah Jane said.   
  
The Doctor smiled. “He worries about you.”   
  
Sarah Jane piled the dishes in the sink and turned to the Doctor. “He’s my son,” she said, and there was every meaning possible to those three simple words.   
  
“I’m glad,” the Doctor said. “I was... afraid I might have....”   
  
“Ruined me for life?” Sarah Jane asked with a grin. “I’ve never been happier.” She tilted her head at him and added, “And I do mean never.”   
  
There was a heavy sadness to the Doctor’s impassive face. “Right,” he said. He stood up. “I should be going.”   
  
He turned to head back to the sitting room and the TARDIS. She watched his narrow back as he strode away from her, and Sarah Jane couldn’t let him go. “I’m glad you got to meet Luke!” she called after him. He stopped and turned back to her. “Especially since it... means so much to him.”   
  
“It meant a lot to me, too,” the Doctor said. “He’s a remarkable young man.” He frowned a little. “You realize the Earth is extremely lucky, here.”   
  
“How?”   
  
“If the wrong person had gotten a hold of that young man, he could be the most powerful destructive force in this quadrant of the galaxy.”   
  
Sarah Jane shrugged. “I don’t think about that. He has a big heart.”   
  
“He has the best and the worst of half the city of London,” the Doctor said. “If he ever falls in love there could be trouble, keep a very close eye on him.”   
  
“He seems a bit slow in that area.”   
  
“Lets hope it stays that way. He’s maturing oddly, the accelerated growth the Bane made him with is a little unstable. His hormones are slightly off balance. It’s not dangerous, but it’s awkward. He hasn’t told you, but it worries him sometimes.”   
  
“He told you, though.”  
  
The Doctor tilted his head. “I think it was guy stuff,” the Doctor said. “I’m glad you left us alone there were... quite a number of things he wanted to ask me about.”  
  
“I’m glad he got the chance.” She shook her head. “I really had no idea how he felt about you. I’m sorry if he embarrassed you.”  
  
“He didn’t,” the Doctor said. “Sarah Jane...” the Doctor stared at her for a long moment. “You know if I could have....”  
  
Sarah Jane looked down at the kitchen floor. “I didn’t want that from you,” she said. “What we had was enough.”   
  
“More than enough sometimes, as I recall.”   
  
Sarah Jane blushed and looked down. “Enough! or too much,” she said, quoting William Blake.   
  
“Proverbs of hell,” the Doctor said.   
  
“You going to be all right?” Sarah Jane asked.   
  
The Doctor nodded. “You know me. Go on, great big universe.”  
  
Sarah Jane nodded. “But what about tonight?” she heard herself asking.   
  
The Doctor stared at her, still as stone.   
  
“You’re alone,” she said. “And you FEEL alone, or you wouldn’t have kissed me.”   
  
The Doctor still did not move.   
  
“How long has it been?” Sarah asked.   
  
“Nearly two years,” the Doctor said.   
  
Sarah Jane blushed as she said, “Then you’re overdue.”   
  
The Doctor opened his mouth and stared at the ceiling, as if considering what to say.   
  
“I understand if it’s impossible,” Sarah Jane said. “I’m not young anymore...”   
  
“Neither am I,” the Doctor said earnestly.   
  
Sarah Jane blushed as she looked down. “You look it.”   
  
“I don’t feel it,” he said. “I’m over nine hundred.”   
  
She looked up at him in wonder. “It’s been over four hundred years?”   
  
“Just about,” the Doctor said.   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head and turned away. “I’m surprised you remember me at all,” she said, ashamed.   
  
Sarah Jane felt hands on her shoulders as the Doctor took her, turned her, gazed into her eyes. “There are people I never forget,” he said. “Unique... amazing people.” He touched Sarah Jane’s cheek very gently with his thumb. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m overdue.”  
  
Sarah Jane looked down, smothering a tearless sob. “So am I.”   
  
The Doctor’s face was very close to hers, now, his breath tickling on her skin. “How long has it been?” he asked her.   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “Too long. I couldn’t keep anything. I’d take someone on, sometimes,” she said quietly. “It was the eighties. Nineties. Usually while I was traveling. Someone in Venezuela, someone in South Africa, once in Sri-Lanka. A weekend. Two weeks. Once or twice even a month. But then I’d be done,” Sarah Jane said. “I had to get rid of them. It would be months in between them. Sometimes years.” She looked very shy as she said, “I got used to waiting, you see.”  
  
The Doctor’s face softened in sympathy as he bent down to kiss her. “Waiting,” he said into her mouth.   



	3. Chapter 3

Thirty-some years before, by Sarah Jane’s personal time scale, she woke up one morning in the TARDIS still tired, deliriously happy, and quite sore. The Doctor was nowhere to be seen. She’d showered, dressed, and made her way to the control room, where sure enough the Doctor — her Doctor, tall and lanky and rumpled and mad — was poking about organizing coordinates. She grinned when she saw him, and went up to him to kiss him good morning.   
  
He hunched as if she was striking him with a cattle prod, and all she caught was his scarf. “What do you say we go to Arent minor?” he offered, as if he had not just flinched away from her in horror. “They’re having a coronation of the twenty-seventh king of the lower reaches. They say that when the king reaches the top level of the steps, the egg in his belly hatches, and—”  
  
“Doctor?” Sarah Jane interrupted him.   
  
“Or how about seventeen-ninety?” he asked. “There’s this fantastic alehouse just off the river from—”  
  
“Doctor!”   
  
He stopped his distracted fumbling with the TARDIS controls and looked at her for the first time. “Yes?” he asked evenly.   
  
“So that’s it, then?” she asked. “One night, and then back to this? As if last night never happened?”   
  
The Doctor stared at the TARDIS controls for a long time before he said, “Last night was a mistake.”   
  
Sarah Jane fell against the wall as stunned as if he had slapped her.   
  
“I shouldn’t have...” the Doctor went on. “It would probably be best if you did regard last night as a... nonevent.”  
  
Devastation swept through Sarah Jane. He had willed her heart out of her last night to the point of no return, and now he just wanted to forget it? He couldn’t do this. The bastard! She wanted to scream. She wanted to hit him. She wanted to go mad. But she was Sarah Jane Smith with a core of iron, and she could control herself.   
  
But she was trembling. She couldn’t hide the sob in her voice as she turned to go back down the hall to her quarters. There wasn’t anything she wanted to take with her. She just wanted away from him, his wretched blue eyes and his soft carded wool hair and his deep-space dark voice and his hands — oh, his hands! “Take me home,” she said over her shoulder.   
  
“Sarah!”   
  
“I want to go home!” she yelled.   
  
“And that’s why it was a mistake!” the Doctor called at her retreating back.   
  
Sarah stopped. The tears in her eyes were dangerously close to escaping, but she stopped. She stood there, shaking, waiting for what the Doctor would say. When he said nothing she finally turned.   
  
He was sitting on the floor in sulk mode when she did. Her old Doctor, the iron-headed wisdom who treated her like the tea-girl, or, in moments of extreme fondness, a young and very silly niece, would never have sat on the floor. He was a velvet suited, ruffle shirted gentlemen of intellect. He had dignity.   
  
This Doctor, who seemed so much younger, was flippant, humorous, occasionally petulant, and almost childlike in his delight in sweets and travel. And her. They had been growing closer and closer in the last few months until it had finally culminated in last night. Last night when he had kissed her, and she had let him. Last night when he had taken her into her bedroom, and the universe opened a second time. Last night which had almost been overwhelming, where he was insatiable and empathetic, where he had fulfilled her every desire until she was beyond exhausted, and still he wanted more of her, and she couldn’t bring herself to say no. It was the single most incredible experience of her life, and now the Doctor was saying it had been a mistake.  
  
“That’s not fair,” Sarah Jane said to his hunched form. She kept her voice even and slow. “You can’t treat someone like this. I don’t know what you thought you were doing if this is how you’re going to act now. I’d rather you’d have hit me. I’d rather you’d sent me home.”   
  
“Idiot,” he muttered, and Sarah was hurt, until she realized he was talking to himself. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I don’t do this. I don’t do this, I know better. I know better than to start this with a human, I know it.” He threw up his hands and got to his feet. “I know it, so why don’t I listen to myself? Rassilon reincarnate, I should have stopped. I should never have started.” He stopped and took a deep breath before looking at her. “I am sorry,” he said formally. “You are quite right. This was not fair to you.”   
  
“So why are you doing it?” Sarah asked.   
  
“I can’t help it,” the Doctor said. “It is a sad fact, Sarah, but we are not compatible.”   
  
This was patently insane. They were inseparable. The Doctor himself called her his best friend. They had the same enthusiasm, the same zeal, the same delight in this crazy, pinball life in the TARDIS. Without a grudge, Sarah said lightly, “That’s just not true.”   
  
The Doctor turned away from her and pulled at his scarf. He twisted the end of it in his hand and then turned back to her. “Sexually speaking,” he said with some difficulty.   
  
“Doctor,” Sarah Jane said. “I don’t know where you think you were last night, but if you were there, you know that’s not true, either.”   
  
He closed his eyes and started waving his hand, as if he could conjure the right words up from nothing. “Sarah, you’re human,” he said at last.   
  
“True,” Sarah said.   
  
“I know you don’t make a big point of this,” he said evenly. “But I am not.”   
  
“I know that.”   
  
“Let me put it this way,” he said, suddenly sounding relieved. He sounded very clinical as he started listing statistics. “Human beings have a life span on an average of seventy-five years,” he said. “The females have a fertility window from the ages of fifteen to forty. During that time they will birth, on average, and depending on cultural norms, between two to twelve offspring. They have a gestation period of nine months and a fertility cycle of approximately twenty-eight days, of which five to fourteen days are available for fertilization. To take advantage of this limited window of fertility, human males have adapted with the desire to mate at an average of ten to twenty times during the fertility cycle.”   
  
Sarah Jane was starting to feel uncomfortable. She felt like she was being described by a zoologist. “So what’s your point?”  
  
“Time Lords have a life span on average of one to two thousand years,” the Doctor said. “The females have a cyclic fertility window variant upon the frequency and duration of their regeneration cycle. During that time they will birth, on average, one to three children, usually in their early regenerations.”   
  
Sarah Jane was not an idiot. She was starting to see where this was going.   
  
“To curb the detrimental effects of this extended fertility cycle, Gallifreyan males...” He stopped and looked at Sarah Jane. He sighed. “We just don’t very often,” he said, all the air of scientific instruction gone. He leaned his elbows against the console and rested his forehead on his thumbs.   
  
Sarah Jane went up to him and stood beside him. She did not touch him.   
  
He glanced at her, and his voice was very heavy as he said. “Humans feel... abandoned,” he said. “When their advances are rejected. You begin a sexual relationship with a human being they expect it to continue on a fairly regular basis. But my regular... and yours are a very different thing.”  
  
He shook his head and stood upright, but he still wouldn’t really look at her. “It’s easier just to not start with a human,” he said. “It always ends badly. And that is why last night,” he turned to look at her properly. “Was a mistake.”   
  
Sarah Jane tried to look seriously at him. She tried to keep herself impassive and controlled. But her face slowly broke into a sunny grin, and she said, “But a brilliant one, wasn’t it?”   
  
The Doctor smiled, but it was wary.   
  
“You’re telling me,” Sarah Jane said, just to make sure she got it, “that compared to a human being you have a decelerated libido, which results in a longer lag time between coitus, is that it?”   
  
“Yes, that’s pretty much it,” the Doctor said. “Months, sometimes years, if we don’t find anyone suitable. If we had a libido as strong as a human we’d have bred ourselves out of existence generations ago.”   
  
“I understand,” Sarah Jane said. “So where’s the mistake?”   
  
“What?”   
  
“So I’ll have to wait,” Sarah Jane said. “I can handle that. If last night is any indication, when you do, you tend to make it worth while, am I right?”   
  
The Doctor hesitated for a moment before saying, “True.”   
  
“So?” Sarah Jane took his hand. “We’re together in this, Doctor. This is a hiccup, but I can adapt. I am not a mistake.” She took a deep breath. “So, no snuggling or cuddling. I take it physical contact will make you uncomfortable for a while?”   
  
“I... don’t like starting something that will go nowhere,” the Doctor said.   
  
“I can handle that,” Sarah said. She swallowed. “You will let me know, when...?”   
  
“If you’re willing to put up with this...” the Doctor said quietly, “trust me, Sarah. You’ll know.”   
  
“Good,” Sarah said. “But a relationship is a two way street. I can adapt, but you have to as well.”   
  
The Doctor looked nervous. “How?”   
  
“I claim,” Sarah said, “one single morning after kiss.”   
  
The Doctor’s eyes softened, and he pulled her close. One hand went around her shoulders. The other lightly caressed her throat, pulling her lips toward his. With the tenderness of a summer rain his mouth parted hers, and he kissed her with the movement of the ages.   
  
Sarah Jane opened her eyes after he left her, a deep warmth spreading through her. He turned back to the console, again her dear friend, untouchable, warm but distant. She didn’t know how long it would be before he was ready to be anything else.   
  
Sarah touched a wry hand to her lips. It was okay. That sort of thing was worth waiting for. 


	4. Chapter 4

Bannerman Road, Ealing.   
  
The Doctor kissed her, melting her head onto the pillow one more time, and then rolled off her. Sarah Jane, trembling, sweating, searching for air, looked over at him. “I know you’re not finished,” she gasped.   
  
The Doctor smiled at her. “No. But you are.”  
  
“Trust me, I’m not,” Sarah Jane said, despite her exhaustion. She felt like a burning fire, no longer a flame of desire but a pulsing star of heat itself, and she wasn’t ready to be cooled. They were curled tight together in her bed, a sticky, buzzing knot of passion. He had suggested the TARDIS, but Sarah Jane had gently pointed out that that thing had a tendency to take off with her inside it. “Well, it likes you,” the Doctor said, but had conceded her bedroom was probably safer. Presuming they could stay quiet enough not to wake Luke. That had added a new element to the evening, one that had frequently had them both in giggles. But it was beautiful. They were each in desperate need of the other. It had been a very hard day.   
  
The Doctor lightly ran his finger across her eyebrows, and then touched the tip of her nose. “Your heart rate has increased to twenty-eight percent of normal, your body temperature has risen over two degrees, and your respiration is stressed, you’re already suffering the effects of hypoxia.”   
  
Sarah Jane sighed. He was right, of course, but she didn’t want this evening to end. “I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.”   
  
The Doctor shook his head, smiling fondly. “It’s not that. I’ve just learned to pay closer attention. You need at least twenty minutes rest, and a glass of water.” He handed her one from the bedside table and then kissed her gently. “Remember the time you passed out?”   
  
Sarah Jane laughed. “Was that after the mummies?”   
  
“I think so.”   
  
“What a time we had!” Sarah Jane murmured, and took a long swallow from the glass.   
  
The Doctor’s eyes were distant as he said, “What a time we’re having.” He sighed happily and snuggled her closer to him. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time. You make me feel young, Sarah Jane. Young and easy in my mind.”   
  
“I’m glad,” Sarah said. “I felt... I felt so old this afternoon. Like I didn’t belong.”  
  
The Doctor was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “You don’t.”   
  
Sarah Jane looked at him, certain he couldn’t mean to be so hurtful.   
  
“You’re better than them,” he continued. “In a way. You belong to a time in my life when I wasn’t... this. I may have seemed older, but I was half this age. I was carefree. Hopeful. I lost all of that, you know. People I cared about started to die. Then I turned hard.”   
  
“But you found other people to care about, right? Not so hard that you couldn’t let anyone in.”   
  
“For a while,” the Doctor said. “After Gallifrey fell I was... very hard. I traveled for a long time alone. Until I met Rose.” He took a deep breath and sighed.   
  
“You love her very much.”   
  
He shook his head. “Wasn’t to be.”   
  
“It wasn’t?” Sarah Jane asked. She looked up at him. “You didn’t...?”   
  
“I wanted to,” the Doctor said. “But it didn’t start out that way. She’s very young, Sarah. Just nineteen when I met her.”   
  
“I wasn’t too much older.”   
  
The Doctor shook his head. “You were born a hundred and six,” he said fondly, and Sarah Jane laughed.   
  
“It wasn’t just that. I don’t usually, you know. Usually I take on friends, students, people who remind me of... family.”   
  
“And with humans, it’s easier not to start,” Sarah Jane said quietly.   
  
The Doctor nodded.   
  
“But Rose...?”  
  
The Doctor shook his head. “She wasn’t like you,” he said. “I told you — you’re amazing. Rose wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Maybe she could have come to it, given a few decades. But as she was... Rose is too hot, too passionate. She took on Micky and Jack and... Lord, seemed like half a dozen. Made me jealous as all hell, but I let her. She needed it. If we’d ever started... it would have been dreadful. She’d have been on me like white on rice. She almost was anyway. We’d have come to hate each other.” He sighed. “But she brought me back from hell, all that heart and enthusiasm. She deserves him, after everything she did for me.”   
  
“What do you mean?”   
  
“He’s human, Sarah.” She could hear the raw envy in his voice as he said, “He’s part Donna Noble. And Donna... isn’t at all a Time Lord. All the things that made it so difficult for us... they don’t exist with him.”   
  
Sarah Jane closed her eyes and tilted her head back on the pillow. “Lucky girl,” she said.   
  
“If I ever get another human carbon copy, he’s yours,” the Doctor said with bleak irony.   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “No, thanks. I couldn’t bear to hear the envy in your voice. Besides. I think I’d need a rewind button.” She touched the Doctor’s young, angular face. “You look young enough to be Luke’s brother.”   
  
“It’s the wrong face, isn’t it,” the Doctor murmured. “This isn’t the one you fell in love with.”   
  
“Oh, this one has it’s charms,” Sarah Jane said. “But it’s not MINE. I’m sure it’s a very human trait, but I got used to you as you were. Watching you regenerate once was hard enough. Though it seemed to make you fonder of me.”   
  
The Doctor shook his head. “It wasn’t that,” he said. “It was foreknowledge.”   
  
“What?”   
  
“I could never tell you this before. Just before we ended up embroiled in that trouble on the planet with the spiders, and I regenerated, I got zapped back to Gallifrey. I’m sure you’ve caught up to that incident by now, you remember?”   
  
“Oh, God, yes,” Sarah Jane said with regret. “There were four of you, and still my Doctor wasn’t there.”   
  
“That regeneration was trapped,” the Doctor said. “But I was pre-exposed to the next one.”  
  
“The blonde,” Sarah Jane said. “He... you...” She sighed. “You looked so frightened of me.”   
  
“It was confusing,” the Doctor said. “There was you, after everything we had shared. And me, before it.” He shook his head. “I had to try and hide it when I saw you again. I may have looked terrified, but you looked miserable.”   
  
“It wasn’t fair,” Sarah Jane whispered. “I had you back, but I didn’t. And yes, I had to hide what we had been from you — the younger you — because of all the time effects you told me about, which meant we could barely talk. And I couldn’t talk at all to the blonde you I hadn’t met before. I didn’t know you like that, and he — you — hadn’t come back for me, and you looked so scared.... I just wanted to go home.”   
  
“It was a very dangerous situation,” the Doctor said. “I had to send you home and pretend none of it had ever happened. But between the actions of you and my older self, my younger self wasn’t a complete idiot. I had gathered that something would happen between us. It made me soften towards you.” He sighed. “Probably a predestination paradox. I hate it when those happen.”   
  
“I think we would have happened anyway.”   
  
The Doctor squeezed her bare shoulders. “Probably right.”   
  
“So if it wasn’t Rose, who was it two years ago?”   
  
The Doctor looked incredulous. “Why do you ask?”   
  
“Voyeurism,” Sarah Jane said mischievously. “Are you going to tell me, or not?”   
  
The Doctor got a wistful look on his face. “Madame de Pompadour,” he said. “Renette.”   
  
“Ooh, a professional,” Sarah Jane said wickedly.   
  
“Oh, she was,” the Doctor said. “And quite insistent. Bright as a star. I nearly took her with me, but we missed each other somehow. For the best, probably. Too passionate. Too important to history, really, even by offering I was being reckless. But she loved me. She called me her ‘lonely angel.’” He paused. “I was feeling very lonely right then.”  
  
“Didn’t you have Rose or Martha or...?”   
  
“Rose and Micky,” the Doctor said. “But it was just after I left you behind, after the Krillotain incident.”   
  
Sarah Jane stared at him. He caught the look.   
  
“You can’t leave behind one of the most important people in your life for a second time, and not feel lonely afterwards,” he said.   
  
The words filled Sarah Jane, confused her, and finally overwhelmed her. What with the overstimulation of her limbic system and an overdose of natural endorphins, her inhibitions were shot. She started to cry.   
  
“Oh, hey, hey,” the Doctor said, pulling her to him. He kissed each of her eyelids. He did not try to placate her with platitudes that everything was really okay. He merely whispered, “Don’t.”   
  
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just being silly. I really am so very happy, you really can’t believe it. I have Mr. Smith and Maria, and I have Luke. And you can’t believe... there are no words for what I feel for Luke.”   
  
“I believe it,” the Doctor said tenderly.   
  
“I’m just silly,” Sarah Jane said, drying her tears. “I must be getting old.”   
  
“Stop saying that, you’re beautiful,” the Doctor said. “I don’t care about your age. I don’t even know exactly how old you are.”   
  
“Neither do I,” Sarah Jane said.   
  
“How can you lose track?” the Doctor asked, incredulous. “It can only go into the double digits.”   
  
“Not when time isn’t a constant,” Sarah Jane said. “I lost a few years darting about space, and when I got back my synch was off.”   
  
“Easy enough to pick it up again,” the Doctor said. “Look at your birth certificate.”   
  
“Not accurate,” Sarah Jane said. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not angry with you. But you do make an awful lot of mistakes.”   
  
“What?”   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “It wasn’t Croydon. And it wasn’t 1980.”   
  
“What?”   
  
Sarah Jane looked at him a bit askance. “When you dropped me off. You left me in Aberdeen in the middle of the seventies,” Sarah Jane said. “I had to spend seven years avoiding myself.”   
  
“Good Lord, Sarah, I’m sorry.”   
  
“It was all right,” Sarah Jane said. “I cleaned up in financial investments. And I was always spot on location for a story.”   
  
The Doctor laughed. “I’m sorry. This shouldn’t be funny, I should be horrified, but....” and his words were lost in his laughter. And as Sarah watched, his laugher degenerated into near tears. He composed himself and sniffed, taking a deep breath.   
  
“I think we’ve both had a hard day,” Sarah Jane said. “So long as we’re making deep confessions, can I ask you a question?”   
  
“What?”   
  
“Why did you send me K-9?”   
  
The Doctor grew quiet. “At the time,” he said, “I was with a girl.”   
  
“Were you...?”  
  
“With Leela? Lord, no! It would have been positively amoral. She almost saw me as a god, and no, I did not encourage that. She was... savage. A primitive degeneration of a distant human colony. It was amazing, they still spoke English. She was completely murderous. It was stunning to listen to her. She’d pull a knife out of her boot, hold it to someone’s throat, and announce in a pristine, posh accent, ‘If you do not listen to the Doctor I will kill you where you stand!’ It was delightful!” He laughed.   
  
“When I found K-9, she... she didn’t get it. She didn’t get the joke. She didn’t appreciate the sentience or the humor or... anything about him, really. He was good in a fight, that’s all she saw. And I missed you.”   
  
Sarah Jane swallowed.   
  
“I missed you, every time I looked at him. Every time I spoke to him I thought, ‘Sarah would get it. She’d love him.’ So I copied him. I made a complete replicant, down to the syntho-synaptic relays, and I brought it down to Earth. I left it in your Aunt Lavinia’s attic. I thought you still lived there, you see.”   
  
“You could have just....” Sarah Jane didn’t say it.   
  
“Come to fetch you?” the Doctor asked. He shook his head. “I thought about it. But I didn’t think you and Leela would get along. And she was homeless. Then I got highjacked by a guardian and sent off with another Time Lord to go after the key to time. Then we were on the run from the Black Guardian, and it was too dangerous to go anywhere near Earth. By the time she left me it had been over a hundred years. I’d gotten used to living without you, by then.”   
  
Sarah Jane looked over at him. “And what was her name?” she asked.  
  
“Who?”   
  
“The Time Lord.”   
  
“Romana,” the Doctor murmured.   
  
Sarah Jane laughed once. “Hm. No complications there, I’ll bet.”   
  
“Physically, no, but she was such a know it all!”   
  
“And we don’t know anyone like that,” Sarah Jane smiled.   
  
The Doctor turned sober. “She died with all the rest of them, in the end. Burned with Gallifrey.”  
  
“Everybody dies,” Sarah Jane said. The words could have been construed as harsh, but she said them so gently it sounded like a comfort.   
  
The Doctor smiled sadly. “But you don’t, really,” he said. “Not for me. Not if I’m careful.”   
  
“What do you mean?”   
  
He hesitated for a long time, and then said, “You want to know the real reason why I didn’t come back for you, Sarah?” he asked.   
  
Sarah Jane swallowed. She desperately wanted to know the answer. His previous answer, “I just couldn’t,” wasn’t enough. She had accepted it, the same way she accepted all his oddities, but it wasn’t enough.   
  
“I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. One goodbye was enough. I knew, you see. I knew I’d have to do it again, if I came back.” He pressed his mouth to her temple and breathed in the scent of her hair. “You have to understand. When you’re with me, you die. If I leave you... If I leave you somewhere safe. A home. Somewhere you have a purpose, somewhere you can be you... suddenly you become immortal. You’re always there. You were always there. Waiting for me, in the nineteen-eighties.” He sighed and pulled her to him. “You would never die for me,” he whispered into her hair.   
  
She caught two distinct meanings in that last sentence.   
  
Sarah Jane’s throat caught. There was something he had to hear. “It’s not true, you know,” she said.   
  
“What isn’t?”   
  
“What Davros said.”  
  
“He’s pure evil, I know that,” the Doctor said, but Sarah Jane knew he wasn’t dismissing it so easily.   
  
“He’s not just evil, he’s wrong,” Sarah Jane said. “You don’t turn people into weapons. I am not a weapon. I am Sarah Jane Smith. And what you have done is turn me into a smaller, quieter version... of yourself.” She touched his chest. “You’re the fire, Doctor. Fire sheds light and heat, and yes, it can get out of control, and you can burn up if you get too close, but if you don’t have it you’ll freeze to death when the cold creeps in. There would be no civilization without it. When we touch you — when you touch us — we become flames. And then we can shed more light through the universe. And we can create more flames. Luke is a flame. Maria and Clyde are flames. Jack and his friends at Torchwood are flames so hot I don’t dare go near them, but that’s needed where they are. We’re willing to die for a cause only because you are willing to die, and we’ve all seen that.”   
  
He shook his head. “So many have died just to keep me alive,” he whispered.   
  
“And so, so many have lived,” Sarah Jane replied.   
  
The Doctor sighed.   
  
“We do it because we love you, Doctor,” Sarah Jane said. “Ghandi said, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’. When we see you... all we want is to see that again. So we become it.” She lightly touched his cheek with her knuckles. “I live my life as I live it because I loved you.”  
  
He looked down at her. She missed the voice as deep as space itself and the soulful dark eyes, but the eyes that watched her now held the same soul. “Loved?” he whispered.   
  
“Oh, come, Doctor, does it need saying?”   
  
He chuckled.   
  
She turned her body toward him. “Say it.”  
  
He smiled gently. “I’ve been saying it all night.”   
  
“I know. Say it anyway.”   
  
The Doctor tilted his head and leaned his forehead against hers. His gaze was soft, and fond, and desperate. He said no words. Slowly, he started kissing her again, pulling her rested body back into the sensual cadence that he could keep up, Sarah Jane knew, for literally twelve hours straight. He said absolutely nothing. Sarah Jane could hear nothing, feel nothing, but she knew. It didn’t need saying. 


	5. Chapter 5

Thirty some years before.   
  
Sarah Jane and the Doctor — her Doctor — were lying in Sarah Jane’s bedroom on the TARDIS. The Doctor had nearly died — again!— battling an ancient terror called Morbius, and it felt so good to know that he was there, safe and sound, in her arms. “I love you,” she breathed, exhausted.   
  
The Doctor hummed and stroked her hair. He was half asleep.   
  
Sarah Jane sighed. “You never say it,” she said. The words were almost languid, and almost annoyed. “You never say how you feel.”   
  
“Does it really need saying?” he asked.  
  
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes, it does.”   
  
“Why?” he asked.   
  
Sarah Jane, barely able to move, shifted her head to glare at him good-naturedly. “Because it’s not fair,” she said. “I tell you how I feel. You never do.”   
  
“I can’t.”   
  
Sarah Jane scoffed and turned away. She wasn’t going to press it, but she was annoyed.   
  
The Doctor almost laughed. He turned her toward him and gazed into her eyes. “You know why I never say it?” he said gently. “I don’t have the words.”   
  
Sarah Jane was tempted to melt at the look of innocence in his eyes, but she wouldn’t let herself. “They’re easy,” she said. “I love you. They’re all very short.”   
  
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “But they’re not my words.”   
  
“What?”   
  
The Doctor smiled. “You’re human, Sarah,” he whispered. He nuzzled her cheek. “You’re so human.”   
  
“Is that a bad thing?”   
  
“Not at all. But it does make things complicated.” He looked down at her. “Time Lords are somewhat telepathic,” he said. “Compared to humans, our psychic energies are... unfathomable.”  
  
“And you’re not at all arrogant about that, are you,” Sarah Jane said wryly.   
  
The Doctor chuckled. “Don’t joke,” he murmured fondly. “I’m telling you something important.”   
  
Sarah Jane listened.   
  
“On Galifrey, there’s no word for love,” he said quietly. “The word is inadequate even on Earth, because you can love going to the movies, jelly babies, your dog, your lover, your child, and there’s no distinction between any of this. Love — the bond, the desire, the need, the surrender, the passion, the sacrifice, all of it. It’s too big a feeling for a word. On Galifrey, we don’t even try. It’s so big. And to us, we can’t hide it. We feel it, see it. The psychic energies it produces are so strong, we can barely shield it even if we want to. So it doesn’t even need saying.” He sighed at her. “I don’t have the words, Sarah Jane. I can’t bring myself to use the words from some alien language. Those don’t come from me. They’re not true.”   
  
“So what you’re saying is... you can’t say it... because I’m supposed to just know.”   
  
“Pretty much.”   
  
“But I’m not a Time Lord.”  
  
“No.” He did not look either sad or contented with this fact. It was just a fact.   
  
“I can’t just — know.”   
  
“You mean you don’t?” the Doctor asked quietly. And now he did look sad.   
  
Sarah Jane swallowed. “Say it, then,” she said.  
  
“I can’t.”   
  
“You can. To a Time Lord you would be already. So say it now, as a Time Lord. And I’ll try and know.”   
  
The Doctor smiled down at her and pressed his forehead against hers. His eyes weighed down upon her, and whether Sarah Jane had any psychic ability or not, even if she was imagining it... she knew. She knew.   
  
He was right. It didn’t need saying.   



	6. Chapter 6

  
“You’re leaving, aren’t you.”   
  
Sarah Jane had dragged herself form a post-coital stupor as the Doctor pulled back on his suit.   
  
He didn’t answer.   
  
Sarah Jane sat up a little. “Luke will be sorry he missed you.”   
  
“He guessed last night I was leaving,” the Doctor said. “I have a gift for him. I’ll leave it on the coffee table.”   
  
“What?”   
  
“It’s a sixth dimensional cube, his mind isn’t being stimulated enough.” He looked over a her. “It’s a computer game,” he clarified. “Logic puzzles, mostly.”   
  
“He’ll cherish it.”   
  
“He should,” he said. In a small voice he added, “It was my granddaughter’s.”   
  
“From Galifrey?” Sarah Jane whispered in awe.   
  
The Doctor nodded, just once.   
  
“You don’t have to do that.”   
  
The Doctor shrugged. “It’s been banging around the TARDIS for the last eight hundred years, and how many more fifteen year old Time Lords are there going to be to use it?”   
  
“Don’t be flippant,” Sarah Jane said. “I know what that means to you.”   
  
He finished tying his shoe and turned back to Sarah. “You don’t know what last night meant to me,” he said. “There are things that don’t need saying, but this does. For one night... everything went away. The pain and the mistakes and the loss. For one night, I was able to shed the weight of centuries and lose myself in you. For one night, I was myself again. I haven’t been myself for a long, long time.” He took a deep breath. “When you found me last night, I was... probably the worst I’d been since the end of the war. I wasn’t ready to face my own reflection, let alone the universe. You, Sarah Jane Smith, and your son, and your wisdom. You put me right again. And for what that means... well, for that, there are no words.”   
  
Sarah Jane gazed at him. Her marvelous exhaustion made everything a little grey, and her body ached deliciously. “I’ll always be here,” she said. “Early twenty-first century. You know where to find me.”   
  
He smiled at her. “I have something for you, too,” he said.   
  
“What?”   
  
“What I owe you.” He knelt by the bed and took her hand in his. “One. Single. Kiss.”   
  
He touched her lips with his, and the fire glowed steadily between them. The fire and the flame, such that could never be extinguished by anything so paltry as age or faces or time itself. Spanning across years and across decades and across centuries and across the universe, there was something that would always be there, and that didn’t need saying. The fire slowed, cooled to embers, and left Sarah Jane glowing.   
  
By the time she opened her eyes, she could hear the TARDIS engines pulsing down the hall in her sitting room. Sarah Jane smiled.   
  
He was flawed. She was flawed. They made a lot of mistakes between them. But the TARDIS, last night, had most definitely not made a mistake. 


End file.
